In the four months I’ve been away from my blog, my father succumbed to cancer and my mother moved in. I think about David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water,” and I wonder if this is water.
Soaking in a Sea of Emotion 🔗
I grew up in the metropolitan sprawl in the center of Arizona: the land of HOA’s and swimming pools. I didn’t know anyone who couldn’t at least doggy paddle. One of my rare vivid blissful memories from childhood is probably an amalgamation. It is all of the quiet moments I spent floating in a pool on my back, eyes closed, feeling the sun warming the parts of my body peeking out of the water. The separation between air and water was the only thing that changed. The air was as warm as ever, the water as supportive and gentle as ever, and the swaying as rhythmic and soothing as ever. In my memories, I float there endlessly, hovering between sleep and wakefulness, blissfully unaware that drowning was always a possibility.
Those memories take on a different tint nowadays. There’s a yearning for how blissfully ignorant I was of how calcified and heavy emotions can become. Over three decades, the slow build-up of resentment, anger, and frustration makes bliss feel out of reach and the bottlenecked emotions threaten to overwhelm narrowed arteries—signs of an emotional heart attack, I guess… if such a thing exists.
I’m mixing metaphors I’m sure, but nowadays, I find I can’t be bothered to care.
Clearing the Debris 🔗
After listening to an old episode of The Knowledge Project with Lisa Feldman Barrett, I’ve been reflecting a lot on my lack of emotional granularity. For me, anger is anger… and it’s just bad. But anger isn’t just anger, and it isn’t just bad. Anger can be outrage, and it can feel good, even addictive.
I imagine an archaeologist. She is a lone figure squatting on what appears to be solid white stone for miles in every direction. She has a chisel in hand and she contemplates where to start in this vast seemingly empty expanse of white. The warmth of the sun is almost unbearable, and the landscape blinds her. As she looks around, she figures she might as well start here.
tink tink tink
Flakes of white come up with her chisel. She picks them up as she excavates. “What is this?” she wonders. With more and more flakes, she notices they aren’t all made out of the same thing. Some disintegrate in her hands after being handled, “This is rage, perhaps.” Others stubbornly resist, seemingly anchored from below to something bigger than she can imagine—these come up in large chunks, nearly too heavy to move, “frustration?” she wonders.
tink tink tink
As she chisels away and tries to classify and identify what she excavates, she sees that even what she has called “rage” and “frustration” have streaks of something else running through them.
What the Hell is Water? 🔗
David Foster Wallace tells the requisite parable in the (2005 commencement speech)[https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/] to the Kenyon College graduating class:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
He explains:
The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
The obvious but important realities of my life right now are:
- My father is dead.
- My mother lives with us.
- I am (we?! are) pregnant.
Wallace is right, from afar, none of these is easy to spot. From up close, none of these is easy to talk about. The words come in spurts and sometimes, not at all. Some of them point outward, at life, at people who have not lived up to ideals and expectations, at anything and anyone but me. Some of them point inward, at the disarray within—it’s a messy room for which I have no one to blame but myself.
For me, the question is, “How’s the grief?”
As time marched on—it’s day 64—I’m still wondering, “What the hell is grief?”